Theses and dissertations published by graduate students in the Department of English, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University, since Fall 2016 are available in this collection. Backfiles of all dissertations (and some theses) have also been added.
In late Fall 2025, all theses will be digitized and available here. In the meantime, consult the Library Catalog to find older items in print.
Theses/Dissertations from 2020
Thesis: What We Do Not Perceive When We Perceive It, Hannah Jane Trammell
Dissertation: Critical Language Awareness Pedagogy in First-Year Composition: A Design-Based Research Study, Megan Michelle Weaver
Thesis: Responsible Friend, Nina Correa White
Theses/Dissertations from 2019
Thesis: Pangaea, Nishat Manzoor Ahmed
Dissertation: Rhetorics of Functionally Applicative Game Design: Designing and Testing the Project Management Game Scrummage, Matthew Carson Beale
Thesis: Spiraling, Madeline Flynn Carey
Dissertation: The Women of Explosive Ordnance Disposal: Cyborg, Techno-Bodies, Situated Knowledge, and Vibrant Materiality in Military Cultures, April Michelle Cobos
Dissertation: Collaboration and Community in Undergraduate Writing Synchronous Video Courses (SVCs), Kimberly Fahle
Dissertation: Rhetorical Agency in Algorithm-Centered Digital Activity: Methods for Tracing Agency in Online Research, Daniel L. Hocutt
Dissertation: Adding Soul to the Message: Applying African American Jeremiad Rhetoric as Culturally Competent Health Communication Online, Wilbert Francisco LaVeist
Thesis: Sugartown, Emma Moore
Dissertation: Familiar Forms, Strange Uses: Paratexts, Narrative Interventions, and the Queering of Possible Worlds in Illicit Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Britain, Jessica Saxon
Dissertation: Crafting A Pedagogical Identity: A Multiple-Method Examination of an English Department’s Writing Pedagogy, Nathan Alan Serfling
Dissertation: Around Her Table: A Digital Community Archive Featuring Azorean-American Women in New England, Suzanne Lyn Parenti Sink
Thesis: Speaking for the Grotesques: The Historical Articulation of the Disabled Body in the Archive, Violet Marie Strawderman
Thesis: No Net to Catch You, Will Yarbrough
Theses/Dissertations from 2018
Thesis: The Backwoods Stories: A Saga of Fear and Wonder, James McClendon Adams
Thesis: Sub/Mission, Abigail Naomi Brunt
Thesis: Safe Passage to the End of Earth, Gregory Martin Chandler
Thesis: A Right-Hand Man: A Novel, Christopher Giofreda
Thesis: Sugar Acts, Amanda Raquel Gomez
Thesis: Are We All #NastyWomen? The Rhetoric of Feminist Hashtags and Respectability Politics, Kimberly Lynette Goode
Thesis: The Last Cherokee of Blue Ridge, Dexter Benjamin Gore
Thesis: Girlhood, Tarin Kovalik
Thesis: Your Favorite Place, Christina Marable
Thesis: Permanent Resident, Joshua McGarry
Thesis: The Quality of Mercy, Kerry McNamara
Dissertation: Constructing an Early Modern Queen: Posturing, Mimicry, and the Rhetoric of Authority, Megan K. Mize
Thesis: We Are the Bobcats, Jacquelyn Mohan
Thesis: Museum of Unforeseen Circumstances, Ethan Forrest Ross
Dissertation: An Examination of the Key Features of Salman Rushdie’s Historiographic Metafiction: A Possible Worlds Theory Approach, George Shamshayooadeh
Theses/Dissertations from 2017
Thesis: Unconditional Positive Regard, Tyler Beckett
Dissertation: Reconceptualizing the Work of a Content Provider for an Online Audience: A Case Study for How Pedagogical Strategies Can Provide Models of Engagement for Producers of Entertainment, Diane Cooke
Thesis: Algorithm Controls: An Examination of Ethos, Agency, and Interfaces in the Fallout Series, Daniel Cox
Thesis: Intersexion, Cynthia Davis
Thesis: Healthy Living and Other Electives, Lamar Giles
Dissertation: BBC News: Defining Britishness in the Early Twenty-First Century, Christine Gilroy-Reynolds
Thesis: With Light, Emily Howell
Thesis: Mexican Bingo, Amanda Michelle Galvan Huynh
Thesis: Clubbie: Two Seasons with Baseball's Broken Dreamers, Gregory Scott Larson
Thesis: Dead Cooks, Aaron David Lawhon
Thesis: A Little Bit of a Breakdown, Margaret Libby
Thesis: New Elegies, Sarah McCall
Dissertation: Being Retained: Perspective of the Online First-Year Composition Student, Catrina Marie Mitchum
Thesis: The Otherworlds of Men, Aaron Morris
Dissertation: Women’s Entrance Into the Fire Department: A Theory of Collaboration and Crisis, Sarah Vee Moseley
Theses/Dissertations from 2016
Dissertation: Aristotle's Ink: Tattooing a New Understanding of Invention in Collaborative Writing, Rachel L. Bragg
Thesis: EPortfolios, Google Drive, and Cognitive Process Theory, Sarah Elizabeth Carl
Thesis: Sex, Love, and Black Lives, Mack Curry IV
Thesis: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species [Short Stories], Leslie Samuels Entsminger
Dissertation: Communities in (Digital) Space: Creating Networks for Daily Living Through Pervasive Media, Jamie Lynn Henthorn
Thesis: Versus Los Angeles, Thomas Vincent Kelly
Thesis: Explaining Poetry to the Open Heart, Matthew Wayne Larrimore
Thesis: Misplaced Boys, Shori Matsumoto
Thesis: Well This Was Unexpected: Stories from My Life, Barbara Middlebrook
Dissertation: Leveraging Digital Communities of Practice: How Asynchronous Digital Collaboration Afforded a Complex Reading/Writing Dialogue for Secondary School Students, Susanne Lee Nobles
Dissertation: Collaborative Development of an Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Proposal: Negotiation through Boundary Objects, Laura Emond Paganucci
Dissertation: Innovation Adoption and Diffusion in Synchronous Tutoring Owls: A Cross-Contextual Case Study Using Diffusion of Innovations Theory, Cynthia Marie Pengilly
Thesis: Ulu Boyar, Caleb true
Thesis: In the Blooming Red, Elaine White
Thesis: The Secret Society of Fish-Gazers, Hannah Woodlan
Theses/Dissertations from 2015
Thesis: Thunder Snake, Michael Alessi
Thesis: Fire Dancing, Elizabeth Marie Argento
Thesis: Cave Painting, Natasha Lynn Arnold
Dissertation: Multimodal Composing Across Disciplines: Examining Community College Professors’ Perceptions of Twenty-First Century Literacy Practices, Elizabeth Bensen
Dissertation: Community, Identity, and Transition: Student Veterans and Academic Writing at the Two-Year College, Mark Edward Blaauw-Hara
Dissertation: Embodied Literate Practices of Freshman Women Students: A Phenomenology of Students in First-Year Composition, Carmen Lynn Christopher
Thesis: The Newsreel, Robert Eristeed Ciara
Thesis: Artifact, Emily Duquette
Dissertation: Governing Bodies: Caster Semenya and the Rhetorical Management of Sex and Gender Ambiguity in Professional Athletics, Samuel Robert Evans
Thesis: Playing with Food: Practices of Consumption Cuisine and Embodiment in Video Games, Zachary Graham Hill
Thesis: The Wheelhouse, Lucian Charles Mattison
Dissertation: Identities and Interactions in a Transcultural Online Collaboration Project, Zsuzsanna Bacsa Palmer
Dissertation: Pedagogy at Play: Gamification and Gameful Design in the 21st-Century Writing Classroom, Danielle Roney Roach
Dissertation: Creating Memories: Writing and Designing More Memorable Documents, James Eric Sentell
Thesis: Thinking Like This, Andrew Squitiro
Theses/Dissertations from 2014
Thesis: Aesthetics in Visual Rhetoric: An Analysis of the Volkswagen Beetle, Melanie Ann Barker
Dissertation: Narrative Space and Serialized Forms: Story-Spaces for the Mass Market in Victorian Print and Contemporary Television, Laura Daniel Buchholz
Dissertation: "That Doesn't Sound Like Me:" Student Perceptions of Semiotic Resources in Written-Aural Remediation Practices, Jennifer Johnson Buckner
Thesis: Borrowed Time, Alicia DeFonzo
Thesis: The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas: A Family Memoir, Jodi S. Denny
Dissertation: "Warning: This Is a Must Read": Participation and Disruption in Social Artifacts and Spaces, Angela M. Harrison Eng
Thesis: Originally from Dorchester, Gerard Francis Healy
Thesis: Working Holiday, Lauren E. Hurston
Thesis: A New Home in the Wilderness, Amana C. Katora
Dissertation: Refusing a Spoiled Identity: How the Swinger Community Represents on the Web, Barbara Kreston
Dissertation: "Do You Bant?" William Banting and Bantingism: A Cultural History of a Victorian Anti-Fat Aesthetic, Jaime Michelle Miller
Thesis: Outdoor Life, Joshua Burt Norman
Thesis: Dictation From Chrysanthemums, Kevin J. B. O'Conner
Dissertation: Stuck in the Last Ice Age: Tracing the Role of Document Design in the Teaching Materials of Writing Courses, Erin Duffy Pastore
Thesis: Rain in My Blood, Sarah Pringle
Dissertation: Microblogging as a Facilitator of Online Community in Graduate Education, Vincent Anthony Rhodes
Dissertation: From Viva La Revolutión-ish to the Free Space: Toward a Theory of Guerrilla Rhetoric, Cheri Lemieux Spiegel
Thesis: An Island Between: Growing Up in East Texas, William Dillon Tripp
Thesis: Through the Green Briar, Geoff Watkinson
Thesis: At the Unmaking, Wendi Ellen White
Dissertation: Death on Display: Understanding the Publicized Eulogies of African American Cultural Figures as an Empowering Rhetorical Discourse, Melody Shelton Williams
Theses/Dissertations from 2013
Thesis: By the Limuru Road, Ann Barry Burrows
Thesis: Cream City Disco, Lucas Flatt
Thesis: "Sample Speech I' The Market-Place": The Habermasian Public Sphere in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, Anthony Thomas Garcia